The Associated Press is reporting that former Majority Leader Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) has been convicted of money laundering charges. “The verdict came down five years after DeLay was forced to step down as the second most powerful Republican in the U.S,” noted the AP. According to the New York Times, DeLay faces “up to life in prison”:

Jurors deliberated for 19 hours before they came back with guilty verdicts against Mr. DeLay on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The verdict was the latest chapter in a long legal battle that forced Mr. DeLay to step down. The trial also opened a window on the world of campaign financing in Washington, as jurors heard testimony about large contributions flowing to Mr. DeLay from corporations seeking to influence him and junkets to posh resorts where the congressman would rub shoulders with lobbyists in return for donations.

Mr. DeLay faces up to life in prison on the money laundering charge. [...] Judge Pat Priest has wide discretion in sentencing the former majority leader, who was known as “The Hammer” for his no-holds-barred style during 20 years in the House of Representatives. Mr. Delay could be sentenced from 2 years to 20 years in prison for the conspiracy count, and from 5 years to 99 years, or life in prison, for the money-laundering count..

DeLay had concocted a scheme to funnel corporate money from his lobbyist allies into Texas state politics, illegally circumventing state law barring corporate money. DeLay’s front, Texans for a Republican Majority, then used that money to elect a new majority of Republicans to the state legislature and gerrymander the state so DeLay could elect more House Republicans. The new district lines, drawn in 2003, targeted House 11 Democrats for defeat. Investigators narrowed down $190,000 in corporate money funneled by DeLay into the redistricting scheme.

Ohio Governor-elect John Kasich (R) spent much of his campaign selling the “accountability” and “transparency” buzzwords to Ohio constituents this year. Touting a “new way” of doing politics, Kasich promised to “recharge Ohio” with a smaller, more open government that would require accountability within important sectors – like education – that weren’t up to par. This generic rhetoric, however, sounded enough like a revolution to win him the endorsements of several prominent state newspapers, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Columbus Dispatch, and the conservative Cincinnati Enquirer.

But just weeks after defeating Ohio’s incumbent Gov. Ted Strickland (D), Kasich’s incoming administration is turning on those previously-espoused principles and refusing to release the resumes of the job applicants for politically-appointed state government jobs. While Strickland “regularly” released the records of job applicants for the public, Kasich claims that because the resumes are solicited via www.fixohionow.com — a private site owned by the Kasich-Taylor New Day Committee, Inc. — those who desire to work for him have an expectation of privacy. Pointing out that Kasich won its endorsement based on his stated “bias towards openness,” the once-supportive Cincinnati Enquirer lambasted his rationale as “an outrageous nose-thumbing at well-established principles of openness”:

Mere weeks after defeating incumbent Gov. Ted Strickland, the Kasich team has said it won’t make the names or resumes of applicants for state jobs public – an outrageous nose-thumbing at well-established principles of openness and disclosure of public information.

Within a day of opening his FixOhioNow.com website, Kasich had received more than 1,500 resumes for public jobs via e-mail to the site.

But if he gets his way, the public will never know who applied, what criteria were used in hiring – or who might have been more qualified choices.[...]

If this is “transparency,” we’d hate to see what opacity looks like in a Kasich administration.[...]

Governing is not an exercise in devising mechanisms to shut out the citizens you purport to represent – and for whom you are working.[...]

There may be a legal gray area here regarding the private site. That’s for courts to decide. But you don’t have to be an attorney to understand that well-established precedents toward disclosure are being snubbed – and that the spirit of Ohio’s open records laws is clearly being violated.[...]

You can’t privatize the public’s right to know.

Mr. Kasich, you may not be “worried about transparency,” but we sure are.

Another Ohio paper that endorsed Kasich, the Canton Repository, called Kasich’s transparency tap dance “baloney,” demanding to know “where’s the transparency?” Also noting Strickland’s adherence to disclosure, the Repository pointed out that “not only is Kasich sending the wrong message about his commitment to openness, he’s also not doing himself any favors when it comes to winning support” for his “controversial” idea to privatize the Ohio Department and Development, a plan the Repository accepts if “Kasich keeps his commitment to transparency.” However, as noted by Ohio Attorney General Rob Cordray, Kasich “fails [the] transparency test” there too.

While deeply frustrating to the newspapers who believed his rhetoric, Kasich’s retreat into opacity should not be surprising; its an increasingly popular part of the GOP playbook. This campaign season, Republican candidates maneuvered around public accountability as an electoral strategy — a strategy so successful that House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) included it in a survival guide for freshmen House Republicans, even telling them which Capitol tunnel to take to avoid the press completely. With the GOP leadership prescribing the direct opposite of accountability, Kasich may just be following new orders. During his campaign, Kasich told Ohioans “if you’ve got something you want to know, I’ll tell you.” But as the Enquirer aptly points out, “that was then, this is now.” (HT: Plunderbund)

Last year, White House green jobs adviser, and now Center for American Progress fellow Van Jones resigned after Fox News host Glenn Beck’s months-long oil industry fueled campaign to smear Jones. “I’ve been talking about Van Jones, a special adviser to the president, because he’s got the president’s ear and he’s an admitted communist; a radical who wants to fundamentally change America,” Beck said. As part of his anti-Jones smear campaign, Beck claimed Jones is a “9/11 Truther” conspiracy theorist who believes the government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. (Jones said of the charge, “it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever.”)

Now perhaps Beck may have to start a campaign against one of his Fox News colleagues. Yesterday, Fox News analyst and part-time host Judge Andrew Napolitano appeared on the radio show of well-known 9/11 truther Alex Jones, whom Napolitano has had a “close relationship” with. While discussing Fox News host Geraldo Rivera’s recent conversion to being at least open to 9/11 conspiracy theories, Napolitano — who has guest-hosted for Beck on Fox numerous times — said he thinks the government isn’t telling the American people the whole story on the terror attacks:

JONES: OK finally, man because I’ve never raised this with you, because it’s a subject I just leave alone with folks because I don’t want to cause people problems. But you brought it up with Geraldo Rivera, who says he is concerned about building 7, and I want to put the question you put to him to you. I mean, what do you think of Geraldo Rivera coming out — what do you think of 7?

NAPOLITANO: It’s hard for me to believe that it came down by itself. I was gratified to see Geraldo Rivera investigating it. I am gratified to see that people across the board are interested. I think twenty years from now, people will look at 9-11 the way we look at the assassination of JFK today. It couldn’t possibly have been done the way the government told us.

Listen here:

Media Matters’ Eric Hananoki, who notes that the conspiracy theories surrounding WTC 7 have been thoroughly debunked, adds that Napolitano has “dabbled in 9/11 trutherism before”:

In March, while still on FoxNews.com, Napolitano hosted truther Jesse Ventura, who was given an unchallenged platform to push 9-11 conspiracy theories. At the conclusion of that interview, Napolitano wondered if “someday we will look on 9-11 the way we look on the JFK assassination today, that is, where people who question the government’s involvement will be mainstreamed, rather than looked upon as an extremist fringe.” Napolitano also hosted Ventura in October on Fox Business; during the interview, Ventura said he was investigating the “alleged Pentagon plane” attack, to which Napolitano replied, “we’ll be watching.”

So what does Beck think about Napolitano’s 9/11 trutherism? “I have been warning about these people for years,” Beck has said, “these 9/11 Truthers are truly disturbed people.” When asked for comment by ThinkProgress, a press aide of Beck’s told us this afternoon that he is “not in a position to comment,” and asked ThinkProgress to “call back on Monday.”

In an age where the blackhole of Islamophobia threatens to engulf reasonable discourse, the Park51 proposal is undoubtedly its singularity. The mere mention of a possible Islamic community center near Ground Zero in New York City whips the right wing into apoplectic rants about Muslim Nazis and “spooky mosques” that create a “hot bed” for militants.

Manipulating visceral prejudices into a national platform, no right-wing fringe figure has succeeded more in turning hyperbole into a career than conservative blogger and “provocateur” Pamela Geller. Leading the anti-Park51 rallies in New York this September, Geller’s once-fringe vitriol has earned her a national spotlight, a place among mainstream conservatives, and now, an award named after Annie Taylor — the first American to survive a trip over the Niagara Falls — for “her efforts in defense of Judeo-Christian civilization.” Never missing an opportunity to elevate her incendiary rhetoric, Geller used her acceptance speech at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend conference last Friday to claim that not only is the proposed center a “triumphal mosque,” it is “the second wave of the 9/11 attack“:

GELLER: You have to understand that we’re in a war. We are at war now. It’s not coming. It’s not around the corner. We’re at war now. The GZM is the second wave of the 9/11 attack.…We are under attack. Obviously, the violent jihad, the academic jihad, the sociological jihad, the cultural jihad, the academic jihad, we have been infiltrated at the senior level of the DOD. …This is not a conventional war. Each one of you must fight this war…you’re each activated….We have not yet recovered the bodies from 9/11 and we’re under attack with ground zero mega mosque. And make no mistake, Cordoba, iconic of Islam’s conquering of the West, it’s quite deliberate….It’s a triumphal mosque. Because one shmuck in New York says “it’s a mosque of healing” doesn’t make it so. It’s ridiculous, it’s insulting.

Watch her speech:

This thoughtless comparison appears to be a new rallying cry for Geller. Reacting to news that Park51 applied for federally-funded grants, Geller called the request the “latest Islamic attack on the American people in the second wave of the Ground Zero mosque.”

Hearing the pied piper, many other GOP lawmakers like Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN) and Rep. Pete King (NY) followed suit, declaring the application “outrageous” and an “affront to all those who were murdered on 9/11.” Unfortunately, while her rhetoric wreaks havoc on civil discourse and tolerance, there is no indication that she will stop. As her Muslim-bashing ally Robert Spencer pointed out, “even Annie Taylor said nobody should ever do that again. But the winner of this award keeps on doing it.”